Rethinking Researcher Assessment and Incentives at U.S. Academic Institutions

By: Abigail Randolph
Thursday, November 13, 2025
On October 28 and 29, the National Academies’ Center for Advancing Science and Technology hosted a workshop, Rethinking Researcher Assessment and Incentives at U.S. Academic Institutions, to explore new approaches to align research assessment and incentives with efforts to improve research integrity, open science, community engagement, and public impact. A session exploring actions that can be taken to initiate culture change offered multi-level strategies for reform and emphasized that sustainable transformation requires both institutional and cultural change. 

At the professional society level, the American Geophysical Union (AGU) is promoting cultural change in how research contributions are recognized and rewarded. Shelley Stall, Vice President for Open Science Leadership at AGU, described recently implemented policies to promote equitable access to trusted and reusable data and to normalize citation of datasets across associated journals. Following the adoption of these policies, AGU journals observed a measurable increase in citations of datasets and software. AGU has paired policy changes with incentives for researchers to adhere to open science practices with an annual Open Science Recognition Prize and revised Fellows nomination criteria, explicitly rewarding leadership in open science, integrity, and public engagement. 

At the institutional level, universities are re-examining how to support and recognize faculty who engage in work that involves community engagement and has significant public impact. Steven Goodman, MD, PhD, Associate Dean and Professor of Epidemiology at Stanford University, detailed institutional efforts to reform appointment and promotion criteria, decentering bibliometrics and rewarding faculty efforts that make their research reliable, robust, and transparent. The Stanford Program on Research Rigor and Reproducibility (SPORR) has created a Rigor and Reproducibility (RaRe) Award to incentivize and reward work that is both impactful and reliable. Elyse Aurbach, PhD, Assistant Provost for University Outreach and Engagement at Michigan State University, highlighted the Modernizing Scholarship for the Public Good initiative, which provides campuses with a framework for reforming appointment, tenure, and promotion practices to recognize community partnerships and public impact.

At the departmental level, Michael Dougherty, PhD, Professor of Psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park, described a comprehensive reform of faculty assessment criteria to better align assessment with transparency, rigor, and public impact, replacing reputation-based metrics, including journal impact factors and h-index, with indicators that promote institutional and disciplinary values. Now, faculty are assessed on contributions to data and code sharing, ethical and reproducible research practices, and mentorship. Dougherty stated that this shift in assessment criteria has improved morale and rewarded the adoption of practices that promote high-quality research. 

Throughout the meeting, attendees and speakers agreed that cultural change is needed to adopt an expanded expectation of what constitutes a successful and productive researcher. These examples provide evidence that it is possible, and even necessary, for this cultural shift to occur at multiple levels, in order for the adoption of these principles to become widespread. 

A full recording of the workshop, excluding breakout sessions, can be accessed here.